Today we come together to pay our final respects to my once favorite gaming franchise. The prophecy of Kane I will no longer follow. The tanks of GDI I will no longer command. The Allied technology is worthless. The Soviet war machine is gone.

I cannot play this game. Redifining the formula has produced a game more like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II or perhaps Company of Heroes than a classic C&C game. What made C&C great? Structures and the MCV. You got to build your base without having to worry about massive micro-management. You qued up something, went to control your units and when it was up you dropped it on the field. In 4, you don't get that. You don't even get the MCV. You get this worthless thing called a crawler that constructs all your units in house. Should probably also mention that engineer's purpose has been redone from capturing structures to repairing units. Few dedicated structures (Basically you can only build defense structures) and you only get one build que which brings me to my next thing.

Resource gathering. Removed entirely. No longer do you have to gather tiberium, getting new fields or spikes. Instead, you can gather these tiberium crystals that drop from the sky, bring them to your base and you get upgrade points to make your units stronger or unlock extra tiers of units. But with the removal of resource gathering comes the removal of units actually costing money. Essentially what you have is a *craft style game where units cost a supply cap. That's it. No credits. The game is around cranking out units and filling a que. When your units die, just raise another batch at no cost. What does this lead to? Stalemates and wars of attrition. Not exciting.

Also, you can't win by beating your opponents into submission. No, you have to go around and collect these Tiberium Control Nodes to earn Victory Points. Why does this sound familar? On right. This is stolen from Warhammer 40,000 again.

I read somewhere that this game is more about co-operative play where one person each takes a crawler of offense, defense and support. Can someone beat into Raj's head that nobody who plays these games wants to play Co-Op? It was a hindrance in RA3 and now you want to bring it back?
This is not the game I wanted to see. As much as people complain about it being roughly the same game with better graphics I would pretty much like to see that with C&C games. I want to start from nowhere, build up a base and a total army of units and steamroll over my opponent. Games that involve being the uber micro are for Counter-strike players. I on the other hand will be sitting back enjoying a rousing game of Magic: The Gathering, something that still has some semblance of strategy left in it.

I'll leave you with the following quote:
Stormfather wrote: C&C isn't dead yet. It's only lying under the guillotine with its hands tied. You can see the timer until the execution here: http://www.commandandconquer.com/

-Zero

tl;dr

Also, loved the original C&C, never got into Red Alert, etc. etc.

Summary: New Command & Conquer game is nothing like the old ones. It's very bad.

-Zero

Judging from what you have said it seems to be more like Dawn of War 2(multilayer). CoH has "resources" in the way of the captured points providing pop cap, fuel and ammo, also making buildings in that game (depending on what army you are, I am looking at you British) is still important, but not as serious.

I know this might start something I don't want to, but is it really that bad that the new game is well, new to its series (not genre mind you)? While I know the old games are what let it get this far with its "classic" RTS gameplay, is the change in style really that bad that?

(Aside: Discussion I don't mind, in fact I encourage it)

Yes. Remember how in Company of Heroes you had to go around and capture points, collect resources and then use them to fund your army? In C&C4 there's no such idea making me wonder what the point of it all is.

The Brits have to call in trucks while the other armies are stationary (mostly) and that is passed to both sides in C&C4. I do kinda not like the idea of them removing the Scrin as a playable faction, but I can live with it.

But you mention the idea of "Does new equate bad?" In this answer, it's no. If you want to take a fine example of that, all you have to do is look at the Final Fantasy series. I through X all followed a rather rigid JRPG structure. XI on the other hand comes out, screws over the entire formula and it is still pretty great. XII comes out that knocks of XI's system and it's still very good. So, I don't agree with that statement. I just don't think that this system is very good considering the only real strategy is to pump out proper counter units en-mass and blow up your crawler whenever you wanna change strategies from tanks to infantry to air combat. The fact that there isn't resource gathering defeats the purpose in my mind.

But you mention the multiplayer of DoW:II. Now, I'll be honest and say I've never played that. I have done the single player demo and found it okay, but stopped there. Can you explain or elaborate the system to me?

-Zero

Well Essentially DoWII's multiplayer was basicly what ever team you were on, team 1 or team 2, you had your 1 HQ, along with everyone else on your teams HQ right next to yours. This one base did everything (which was essentially just to make units and upgrade those units). It has been awhile but i think depending on what starting unit you pick, basically your hero, you could get certain things from there. The engineer for the Blood Ravens could get ya turrets out in the field. You still have to capture points to get energy, but this came down to the capture a point and put an outpost on it, kind of like CoH with the Americans and Germans. 2 game types from what i remember, the classic for DoW, the victory point deal, or destroy enemy base. Now I play a decent amount of games online, but for the destroy enemy base deal, if your team didn't do a massive attack at the same time, there was pretty much no way to win. You were going up against possibly 3 bases at the same time(there were literally right next to each other) and each one can take a huge amount of damage. Each base was building a consistent number of units, even though they didn't have any points, it was enough to keep at least one powerful unit out on the field.

If this doesn't make much sense, probably cause I am tired, and suck at proof reading to begin with.

I think I get it and based on your description it's a direct copy.

THQ doesn't put out stellar games to begin with. Why would EA copy them?

-Zero

Well, wouldn't put the games on THQ, more relic since they were the makers of those games. Each focusing on the more squad based units and tactics with placement of those units, against walls and not in an open field or in water (more CoH with this part).

Anyway, maybe it is a test to see if they should go in that direction with future games, it seems like some series are doing this to try and create a new genre of game. Honestly can't say though unless I looked for some interviews with producers.

Well, 4 isn't about squads honestly. While squads worked in 3, they're not in 4.

I question the second part there since this is supposed to be the last Tiberium game.

Edit: Should I also mention that EA is in the Red for the 12th quarter (that's three years) in a row?

-Zero

Well I mean a game not specific to C&C sometime down the road whenever, if ever.

Cutting 2600 jobs last year(1100 Feb., 1500 Nov.) would be a good indication of their financial status. Though while in the red in traditional gaming (consoles and what not), they are up in the application games. My last sentence has nothing really to do with anything, just thought it would be worth mentioning.

edit: Oh, and my statement about THQ and the games was saying that the 2 games that are being compared to the new C&C were made by the same Company, Relic, and how they had the same game structure.